Tombstone leveled out.
Instantly, the bogey jinked toward him, accelerating.
Without thinking about it, Tombstone put the Pitts into a fresh series of barrel rolls. The bogey flashed past, thirty feet to the rear, as if he’d vanished from its sensors. It didn’t make sense. Snap rolls were hardly an evasive maneuver for missiles, especially one approaching from the side.
The moment he leveled out again, dizzy and ready to retch, the bogey made an abrupt turn back toward him. He glanced around. He was almost to shore, but there was no hope there: nothing but low marshland, without a hill or stand of trees to hide behind.
The bogey grew larger in the corner of his eye. Tombstone held his breath and started another series of rolls, meanwhile letting the Pitts plummet toward the ocean.
The bogey flashed through the space he’d occupied a moment earlier. It kept going, then entered into another of its broad, lazy turns.
“Okay, you,” Tombstone said, still spinning, blood pounding in his head. “I’ve got you now.”
The beach passed by, no more than a hundred yards below.
But if not…
Leveling out, he pulled the Pitts into as steep a sustained climb as it would endure. He looked back and forth, up and down, searching the sky, trying to blink the dizziness away. In a moment he knew that the bogey hadn’t run out of gas after all. He saw a triangular flash of red light to the north, then the air intake racing toward him. He watched it, watched it… and jammed the stick forward, diving back toward the marsh as hard as he could. Although he didn’t look back, he sensed the bogey swinging onto his tail.
“Now!” he shouted, and yanked the stick hard right. The swamp began to whirl around the cockpit. Timing it carefully, Tombstone stomped on the left rudder pedal, then hauled back on the stick. The vertical spin abruptly hooked into a flat-out climb. Looking over his shoulder, Tombstone saw a geyser of water shoot out of the marsh and rise so high its tip glowed orange in the last light of the sun.
Whooping, he rolled the Pitts Special one more time… for joy.
THREE
“Well,” Two Tone said dryly from the backseat, “that was a real waste of fuel.”
Hot Rock knew his RIO was talking about the extra hours they had pulled circling around and around the site of the sunken sailboat, including an aerial refueling so they could stay on station until the SAR and salvage ops were finished. All that without so much as a glimpse of a Chinese fighter.
He made his voice sound rough and disappointed. “Who knows? We might get another chance.”
“We already had a chance with that helo,” Two Tone said.
“We were too close to the twelve-mile limit. You heard our orders.” Hot Rock eased the Tomcat into a left bank, maintaining his position in the Marshal pattern until it was his turn to trap back onto
“Well, let’s just hope that helo doesn’t decide to take out some other poor civilian boat,” Two Tone said. “Or if it does, that we don’t let it get away again.”
Hot Rock didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure if there was a reprimand behind those words, or not. He had to remember that not everyone was his father. Not everyone could peer into his heart and see that, deep inside, Reginald Stone knew he wasn’t good enough.
Besides, Two Tone was almost a stranger. Apart from the absolute synchronicity imposed by life in a Tomcat, they shared no common interests and rarely hung out together.
Fifteen minutes later it was his turn at last to land, and he angled the big bird down toward what looked pretty much like a post card-sized deck. But his hands remained steady on the controls, his breath flowed smooth and easy, he was perfectly relaxed. He loved this part.
A moment later the Tomcat’s tailhook snagged the three wire and the Tomcat jolted to a halt. Hot Rock smiled. Another perfect trap. His father could never have done such a thing. His brother, either.
“I’ll say one thing,” Two Tone said in his honking accent. “Nobody knows how to get a bird home as safely as you do, man.”
Although Tombstone was a member of the flying club at the Naval Air Station, he preferred to keep his Pitts Special at a small private strip in the middle of the Maryland countryside. Somehow, the biplane looked more at home amongst the motley collection of Supercubs, Cessna 150s and Stearmans that lodged there than it did surrounded by sleek Bonanzas and Sky Kings, not to mention F-14s and F/A-18s. Besides, Tombstone liked the laid-back atmosphere. He liked the grass strip adjacent to the paved one, and he liked how a pot of bad coffee was always percolating in the office building.
By the time he eased the Pitts down onto the grass, the sun was squatting on the horizon, pushing long shadows across the field. Tombstone taxied to his tie-down area, the Pitts bumping over the sod, and killed the engine. Climbed out of the cramped cockpit and dropped onto the grass — and almost all the way to his knees.
His legs were shaking like Slinkys.
He should be dead. That was the thing. He should be dead right now. He’d had close calls before, sure; but this was different. This time he was alive for only one reason: luck. Not because he was such a damned fine pilot, but because he didn’t know how to handle the Pitts properly. The truth was, that bogey should have nailed him on its first pass. And it would have, if he hadn’t pulled out of his dive too soon. Luck had saved him. Pure luck. That was all.
He heard the crunch of gravel under car tires, and demanded that his legs stiffen. He couldn’t endure being seen like this. As he stood, he had to reach up and grab the Pitts’ cockpit coaming to maintain his balance.
“You got back just in time,” said a familiar voice, and Tomboy appeared before him, short and buxom and beautiful in the shadows. Instinctively, he reached out and pulled her to him, and hung on to her rather than the biplane. Her red hair smelled of violet, as if the twilight had gotten caught in it.
“Hey, big guy!” she said, sounding both surprised and pleased. She hugged him back. “That must have been some flight.”
Tombstone began to laugh. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that was some flight.”
Tomboy pulled away from him. Her face was serious. “Before you tell me about it, I’ve got something to tell
Atop the airport building, a beacon began to flash at the first stars.
“The Chinese again,” Tombstone said, thinking of his longtime wingman and best friend, Batman. “What the hell are they up to this time?”
Tomboy put her hand on his arm. “There’s something else, sweetheart. The man who owned the yacht was someone you know. Phillip McIntyre.”
“Phillip… you mean… Uncle Phil?” His knees weakened again. Phillip McIntyre wasn’t really an uncle, but an old friend of Tombstone’s
